Reality can be a B!tch

   For someone outside of this industry it looks like all you do is take pretty pictures all day, either in pretty locations or of pretty models, and for some, that maybe true, but for the majority, IT DARN WELL ISN'T!  You'll never know how much self-restraint I just showed there given my current blood-boiling level of frustration caused by Google. Anyway, back to my point, some days it's all about the excitement of shooting, maybe meeting someone or going somewhere filled with potential, but as a jobbing photographic artist sometimes 'the real world' forces you to bath in the pool of mundanity, do 'work' that isn't even slightly inspiring just to get the bills paid. This is the reality of a jobbing photographer, the dream goes on hold, the creativity gets tucked up in bed and you wrestle to keep your sh!t together to get through the job in hand. And so it has been, yes I've kept my head above water, just, but at what cost?
   Setting aside my current, magnificently anti-social mood; retouching, it's not for everybody.
There are people for whom retouching is hours of delicately caressing an image, refining it to exquisite beauty or precision, and others that regard 2 minutes of post-production picking through a variety of filters as 'retouching'. I fall into the former camp but just occasionally, part of me, a small part (don't go there, this is not a Carry On Film) would like to be happy with just tapping a few buttons, maybe move a slider or two. What's driven me to this lazy ass conclusion? Taking images recently of a building behind London's City Hall, nice strong perspective lines AND countless 1000s of marks on the windows, which for an entirely glazed building is a lot, no, seriously, A LOT, of retouching to clean up. Hours of clean up. And if you retouch 3 images of this building, do you know what that is? It's a 'truck' load of retouching (or something that sounds like that). In slight mitigation at least one of the images will be available as a full colour limited edition print very soon with a second probably as a black and white but that doesn't diminish the brain-dulling tedium of digitally cleaning windows. Yes, I'm sure your heart bleeds for me, I can hear you from here. Here's a 'before and after' illustration of the hell that is digital window cleaning. The Limited Editions will be on my website here , shortly, http://folio-21.com/artGallery-LTD.html

On a far brighter note, I made a new acquisition, delivered at lightning speed, a new mini tripod, though it actually open out to about 5ft it reduces down to 12" and I can set the camera upside down to shoot just above ground level, slung below the tripod legs. It's a Weifeng WF-861 imported from China, sold on eBay from a seller in Leicester, seems well made and it's sufficiently small and light it will be travelling with me in the near future. Would have been nice to get the bike in time for the Christmas shutdown so I could get out and about whilst the rest of you are stuffing your faces with mince pies, turkey and a liberal quantity of alcohol.
  Research continues on finding new buildings to shoot, if you come across a beautiful structure, in London or surrounding areas, by all means drop me an email through my site, folio-21.com

Until next time, I wish you much more time experiencing and shooting than slavishly retouching. And yes, that is the closest you'll get to Christmas spirit from me.